Here, doctor-turned-lawyer Dr Benjamin Koh describes how a compulsory insurance scheme for injured drivers has arrived at a conclusion no clinician would reach — that an operation which relieves a patient’s pain can be regarded as an injury.

I have never injured a patient. Apparently that was my mistake.

A construction labourer hurt his neck in a car accident in January 2019. Nothing dramatic. Soft tissue, sitting on the degenerative changes most of us are quietly carrying by our 40s.

Cortisone didn’t hold. He was offered a cervical foraminotomy that August, turned it down, and stayed with conservative treatment for another nine months.